I’ve read a ton of great intense fiction about men without mothers. Coin Locker Babies, Kafka on the Shore, The Goldfinch, and Blood Meridian are some examples.
I also know of a few stellar male authors who was orphaned at a young age and went on to write great things. Leo Tolstoy and Edgar Allen Poe both lost their mothers at just 2 years old.
Are there any women authors with this kind of background? Can you recommend some books about female characters with this sort of background? Maybe books that explore alienation from mothers or women generally because of an absent mother?
by woggled-mucously
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White Oleander, by Janet Fitch
*Shizuko’s Daughter* by Yoko Mori is a fictionalized account of Mori’s own coming-of-age after her mother’s death when she was young. She has autobiographies to go with it too. The medieval author Murasaki Shikibu also grew up without her mother; she doesn’t talk about it in her diary, but you can arguably see the preoccupation of missing mothers in her novel *The Tale of Genji.*
As for fictional female characters without mothers where it’s a significant part of their character/plot:
*Ink Blood Sister Scribe* by Emma Törsz (fantasy)
*Hurricane Child* by Kacen Callender (middle grade magical realism)
*Lady Tan’s Circle of Women* by Lisa See (historical)
*The Rise of Kyoshi* by F.C. Yee (YA fantasy)
*Whale Fall* by Elizabeth O’Connor (historical)
*The Djinn Waits a Hundred Years* by Shubnum Khan (horror)
*Barbary* by Vonda McIntyre (middle grade sci-fi)
*The Candid Life of Meena Dave* by Namrata Patel (romance)